


Painted Smile

by RedGriffin



Category: Original Work
Genre: Creepy, Gen, Horror, Psychological Horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-28
Updated: 2013-08-28
Packaged: 2017-12-24 22:37:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 708
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/945476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RedGriffin/pseuds/RedGriffin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The story of a little boy and his favourite toy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Painted Smile

My maternal grandfather, Hannes, grew up in rural Finland in the period between the two world wars. He was the oldest son of a farmer and had two brothers: Toivo, three years his junior, and Arvo, eight years his junior. They lived about a quarter of a mile outside of a village in the more northern part of the country whose name I can neither spell or pronounce. Arvo was incredibly popular with the villagers; he was a striking young child, too, with reddish-blond hair and wide green eyes. Everyone said he would grow up to be a handsome young man. He was a remarkably shrewd little boy—it was as if he could tell what someone was thinking just by looking at them, an unusual talent for one so young.

 

One day in 1934, when Hannes was fifteen, Toivo twelve, and Arvo seven, a group of travelling performers—seventeen of them in all—came through the village. Although they only stayed two days, one of them, a young male acrobat, took a shine to Arvo, who reminded him of his younger sister. He gave Arvo a doll that had once belonged to the sister, who had died in a house fire at the age of just eight. Arvo adored that doll; he took it everywhere with him. It was in the likeness of a little girl, with blue eyes, blonde plaits and a painted smile. After a week or so, however, Arvo began acting strangely. He refused to let anyone else hold or touch the doll, even his brothers, and started waking up in the middle of the night and going down to the cellar. The family would find him in the morning, curled up on the cold stone floor, fast asleep, his doll clutched safely against his chest. Perhaps the most unnerving thing of all, however, was the way he would mutter conspicuously to himself, as if having his own private conversation with someone who wasn’t there. That was what it looked like, at least.

He was actually talking to the doll.

 

Six weeks after receiving the doll, Arvo disappeared. Every able-bodied person in the village was looking for him; they scoured the woods around the village for three days straight, but they found no sign of him. On the fourth day, Hannes was searching a separate patch of woodland over the back of their cottage, when a horribly chilling thought appeared in his mind. He turned and ran back to the house, grabbing the lamp that hung in the front room. He opened the door to the cellar and began to descend the stairs. His heart was pounding like a drum, and his ears were filled with the sound of it; his mouth was dry. With each step he took, terror filled him, and by the time he reached the bottom of the stairs he felt as if he were about to faint. Queasiness and fear gripped him with iron fists. Built into the cellar wall was a small cupboard, roughly six feet tall, four feet wide and seven feet long. The door swung open with a weary creak. Dust and plaster dislodged by the action fell onto Hannes’ shoulders and hair, but the sight that greeted him was enough to make the rest of the world stop existing for a moment. Propped up against the wall at the end of the cupboard was the doll, but there was no sign of Arvo. The doll had been used to weigh down a piece of paper. Hannes picked it up and began reading, and, with a jolt, he recognised the hand it had been written in as Arvo’s, a messy child’s scribble.

 

_I’m cold. It’s so dark down here. I wish Hannes was here, he would know what to do. I miss him. I miss everyone. But I’m happy now, like the doll said I would be…_

 

There was more, but it was unreadable. Hannes looked up from the note at the doll, which was no longer a little girl with blonde hair and blue eyes. Instead, it had Arvo’s messy reddish-blond hair and his round green eyes. In the flickering light of the lamp, Hannes would say, that painted smile looked more like a snarl. 


End file.
